A special exhibition of the Nationalgalerie – Staatliche Museen zu Berlin and the Gesellschaft für Deutsch-Chinesischen kulturellen Austausch e.V. (GeKA e.V.), as part of the twin city anniversary of Berlin and Beijing. Funded by the LOTTO-Stiftung Berlin.

The special exhibition „Micro era. Media Arts from China“ at the Kulturfo- rum in Berlin will showcase media arts from multiple generations of Chi- nese artists. It is organised by a Chinese-German team of curators and features four artists who are currently based in China: Cao Fei (*1978), Lu Yang (*1984), Fang Di (*1987) and Zhang Peili (*1957).

From documentary film pictures, and the adapted use of classic film lan- guage to the aesthetics of Japanese anime, the works of art in this exhibi- tion focus on and explore relationships between mind, body and technolo- gy, with installations and single-channel-videos ranging from the 1990s to the present. The title „Micro Era“ refers to the eponymous short story by the widely translated and published Chinese science fiction author Cixin Liu (2013) that tells of a future far from the belief in human predominance.

Historically, within a Euro-American context, video art is often regarded as a democratising art form – through the rapid circulation of information and global events by fast-access technologies. The artists participating in the exhibition scrutinise this thesis of democratisation by reflecting in their visual language the mass production of goods as well as how images and virtual subjectivities are produced and consumed. What role does the hu- man play in a time of digital consumption? How do the artists understand their world through imaging technology, then and now? (off. press)

The last major french exhibition of this artist’s work was held in 1996 at the centre pompidou. More than twenty years later, Bacon : Books and Paintingpresents paintings dating from 1971, the year of the retrospective event at the national galleries of the grand palais, to his final works in 1992. Didier Ottinger is the curator of this innovative exploration of the influence of literature in Francis Bacon’s painting.

The exhibition includes six rooms along the gallery, placing literature at the heart of the exhibition. these rooms play readings of excerpts of texts taken from Francis bacon’s library. Mathieu Amalric, Jean-Marc Barr, Carlo Brandt, Valérie Dreville, Hippolyte Girardot, Dominique Reymond and André Wilms read from Aeschylus, Nietzsche, Bataille, Leiris, Conrad and Eliot. Not only did these authors inspire bacon’s work and motifs directly, they also shared a poetic world, forming a ‘spiritual family’ the artist identified with. each writer expressed a form of ‘Atheology’, a distrust of any values (abstract beauty, historical teleology or deity, etc.) likely to dictate the form and meaning of ways of thinking or of an art work. From Nietzsche’s fight against the ‘backworlds’ to Bataille’s ‘Base Materialism’, Eliot’s Fragmentation, Aeschylus’ tragedy, Conrad’s ‘Regressionism’ and Leiries’ ‘sacred’, these authors shared the same amoral and realist vision of the world, a concept of art and its forms liberated from the a priori of idealism.

The inventory of Francis bacon’s library, undertaken by the Department of history of art and architecture at trinity college Dublin, lists more than a thousand works. While denying any ‘narrative’ exegesis in his work, Francis bacon, nevertheless admitted that literature represented a powerful stimulus for his imagination. rather than giving shape to a story, poetry, novels and philosophy inspired a ‘general atmosphere’ ; ‘images’ which emerged like the Furies in his paintings. (off. press)